Man, that is helpful. I mean that’s a non-intuitive process that was really obscure when read in the manual/guide but makes perfect sense when watched. Thanks Youtube!Still working on my fileserver. To call it done I need one long-ass IDE cable, one custom bent piece of metal to be a top, another working 550mhz processor or one matching 700mhz processor and some way to effectively mount my PC-Geiger. Then its all upgrading hard drive space to keep up with the Joneses.I’ve managed to pull a three drive cage out of a computer I’m scrapping at work, and I just need some light metal-bending and some mounting brackets and I may be able to fit three drives in the area usually reserved for two. Then I’ve got one 3.5 drive space on the side that I can either keep with the floppy it has now (Booo! Booring!) or reserve it for the OS drive. Now if only people made a removable drive sled for 2.5 (Laptop) drives that fit into a 3.5 slot. Then we’d be in business. Huh, I should do a google search for that.

Sweeeeet! I answered my own question. Check it out! One Laptop to 3.5 inch drive sled. And only $35! I can put that in as the OS drive in the 3.5 bay, then jury rig something for the other side in the three drive cage, then put three 500gig drives in there, then I’ve got a 1.5 terabyte server in a 2U case. Brilliant!

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Yeah, so I’ve been playing FFXII for a while now. I’m about 10 hours in so I can give a preliminary once over to the game. That’s right, I’ve played it longer than a lot of reviewers out there. I’ve got all three party members, and they are almost all to level 25 or so. Half have their first quickening, and most are over halfway through with the green part of the license board. I’m going green first because honestly, passive enhancements are king. Start to finish, front to back, they are the meat and potatoes of character building. Yeah, magick, techniks, weapons and armor are good, but until you actually BUY the equipment and abilities they aren’t worth much, except to get to some of the more exotic weapon types that you may find before you’ve really specced for them. IE the mace I just found. But anyway.

I like the license board. It lets me mold my characters any way I damn well please, and yes it does seem silly at times, I’ve really learned to use it to my advantage. And the silliness wears off after a while, I promise. The Quickening system is taking a little getting used to. I mean I can make them “chain” so to speak, but I’m not sure if I’m really getting the most out of them. I mean a tutorial might be nice.

The battle system is pure gold. Pure gravy. Pure golden gravy. I love the fluid combat, moving from one target to another, not just walking down an empty hallway and having huge ass ogres just leap out of nowhere. The world actually feels inhabited for lack of a better term. I mean there is the feeling that you are actually in the world rather than being suddenly jarred into this static attack/battle scene that is the same no matter where you happened to be standing.

The Gambit system is also made of golden gravy. I love being able to tell my guys what to do without pushing X three thousand times to kill three thousand wolves. If they aren’t doing what I want them to, I can override the system and take control manually. If they are doing what I need them to do, they can handle it themselves. Thinking like a programmer is less helpful here because I want to build statements that either nest or have “and/or/not” logic involved. You can only check to see if one condition is true, and execute one command if so. I agree that it would be too complicated if you could do legit programming, but it would still be fun. Of course I’d never leave the menu screen, but that’s another story.

Every reviewer likes the graphics. With good reason. They look great. The world looks lived in, the buildings look real. The people have realistic postures and movements. When a guy in armor walks down a hallway, you can see the individual plates of the armor moving against each other and influencing how they each move. When a person puts their hand on another person, you get the impression that you are actually watching two objects touch. The arm moves like you think it would, the shirt moves like you think it would. Squenix is made up of artists, start to finish.

The plot is grand too. I mean standard RPG complaints abound. There are too many dungeons for some people. The main character is too young and inexperienced for some people. Ya know, this is an RPG. The plot could be diagrammed as “Treasure in hole, monster between player and treasure, kill monster get treasure leave hole.” If that isn’t what you want, I’m sure there is a copy of Hello Kitty Island Adventures or Madden Roster Update 2007 out there for you. And the main character is young and inexperienced. That’s so he doesn’t start at level 50 knowing all the spells. I mean seriously people, you can’t start with all the toys and with half your story already told. There just isn’t anything interesting about that.

In conclusion, FFXII is a badass incarnation of the Final Fantasy spirit with more than a little dash of Vagrant Story. It is an Action RPG with everything I dislike about that genre removed. It is a true Final Fantasy, and above all it is worth every penny. Seriously, play this one or you will regret it.

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Yeah a few months ago my file server just, out of the blue, decided it was time to stop working. Sometimes it would recognize the primary hard drive (OS) and sometimes it wouldn’t. It never recognized the secondary hard drive (Data) which somewhat undermined its utility as a file server.

This is the red server, by the way. My 2U box that I used to call Redserver and may begin calling either Urahara or Kurotsuchi* based on the data storage requirements of the box.

So in a panic I pulled the secondary HDD and put it in a removable USB drive cage thing. Luckily it still worked and well, I’m lazy so the damned thing just stayed there for about eight months. It isn’t that I’m suddenly overflowing with time, I mean I have to beat FFXII, school Disgaea 2, and lay in supplies for Blulicity, after all. And that’s just stuff that I’m not doing with my lady or my friends. So yeah, busy busy busy. What was I talking about? Right, the fileserver.

I benched the server. I pulled all devices from the box and one-by-one started adding them back in. Ram (stick by stick), then the floppy drive, then the hard drive, then the PC Geiger (no product page because they aren’t being made anymore). Then with all the devices in I noticed that it would boot fine, then after about 5 minutes, stop working and all three “lock” LEDs on the keyboard would start blinking. I repeated the process with removing and re-adding devices but no dice. Five minutes of use and it goes tits up. I look for the cost of a new L440gx+ motherboard and damn but they aren’t still being sold for $50-$125 a piece. I’d rather not have to sell my cherry copy of Valkyrie Profile just to buy a server board for a case with no top, thanks.

I still need to get a top made for this thing.

Luckily I started to think “I could probably flash the BIOS, that might do something.” So I downloaded all three BIOS flash disks. It turns out that this board needs three separate devices flashed to actually have all the relevant BIOS updates, so there you go. Then after running all three updates, clearing the CMOS twice and resetting any custom settings I may have made, then it starts actually giving me an error. Turns out my second processor is bad and when it is disabled by the BIOS, everything is golden.

Relatively golden that is. I’m still down one processor and only running on one 550mhz PIII with a gig of SDRAM. This should be functional for file serving over a home network though. I mean it is multi-client only because I have a laptop and desktop, and my roommate has the same. One day I’ll create a VPN box and will be able to hand out VPN access to trusted people. Of course I’ve also got Tim and Sandy, but as she is preggers I don’t think that there will be many LAN parties for the foreseeable future. Unless she kicks Tim out, that is.

So I’ll probably post again when I’ve got Server 2003 working. Then I’ll have all the fun of turning Active Directory back on and trying to figure out how to speed that login process up. Mmmmm, assigning usernames to friends and family while creating rights packages for each. Man I’m wierd.

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So yeah, I’ve disabled trackbacks on this site. I have never in my years of having them enabled actually received one that was legitimate, and I have received plenty of spam. I don’t know if I’ll ever reach the end of these, even with having them disabled. I’ve deleted just the spam ones for two days now and I’m to the middle of October. I haven’t even started on the “legit” published spam tbs. I guess if more of my friends had Movable Type blogs and we responded to each other’s comments, then it would make sense, but with most of my friends on Wordpress (Jason and Martin) or DeviantArt (Chatty) or not having a webpage (Tim, Sandy, John, Sue, 210) it just doesn’t make sense. Ah well. Maybe one day MT will devise a decent anti-spam filter for trackbacks, or I’ll just have them wait for my approval before publishing.

Other than that, not much to say site-wise. Really I think that I’ve got this thing as functional as it needs to be. I like the look, and if I don’t, I can pretty much re-write the whole thing just by switching out my CSS as long as it has similar features. I might crack open my copy of Photoshop and try to give the circuit board banner a little polish, but other than that I really see this thing as done.

Actually that’s not true, I’d love a way to update that “State of the Ninja” thing in the sidebar. I’ve thought about making a second blog specifically for that and having the most recent entry display in an iframe or something similar, but that strikes me as too kludgy. It would give me an archive though, so you never know.

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So, finally upgraded to Firefox 2.0, and yeah that was long overdue. It has a spell checker built in, which makes me wince when I look at old entries to this site. So many red lines. Other than that, it is Firefox as usual. The default look just isn’t really for me, however I just can’t seem to find a skin that really boils my potatoes. Ah well, such is life.

I still haven’t actually had a chance to play FFXII. I know, it is a tragedy. Hopefully tonight I’ll get to work on some of that. Hopefully. I mean I plan to clean my house tomorrow so I don’t think that will leave much time for anything else. I may push the cleaning off to Saturday depending on how well getting up in the morning goes. See, I only see my lady on Friday-Monday so wasting an entire Friday attempting to make my house smell presentable could be a doghouse sort of move. Ah well. FFXII can wait, its not going anywhere.

I’ve been doing my damnedest (wow that looks weird, even spelled correctly) to get this call center upgraded to Win2k because I just can’t stand the thought of running an OS over 10 years old. Windows 2000 is almost seven and I look at it as an upgrade. I mean really. So far, there really isn’t all that much of a stumbling block. Most of the computers in question are 400mhz with 128 mb of RAM, so (as a friend of mine stated) not the most pleasant of computing experiences, but do-able. The only problem, Achilles heel if you will, of the upgrade process is the 2.5 GB hard drives these beasts have. I just can’t fit 2k and all the software I need on the drive with enough space for a big enough paging file to make it worthwhile. It is really pathetic. So I need bigger drives. The only problem is if I am going to put 10 or 20 GB drives into these horror shows that I’m just going to have to replace in three months, I might as well buy a crapton (spell checker doesn’t know crapton) of refurb Dells and just upgrade the whole lot. Decisions decisions…

Ah well. Here’s hoping I get my hands on some time today. I’d love to play that game.

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Well, with the pushback of Burning Crusade I’ve got about three months on hand so tons of time to devote to other games.

Disgaea 2 and I are on the outs a little. I’ll come back to it, there is so much left to unlock, but I’ve gotten to the tedium stage (I’m on cycle 7, because of bad restarting policies) and I’m honestly thinking of just wiping and restarting to get to the real whoopass part of the game. Working on starting more characters as genius and getting better versions of the unique items.

See, all items have a rarity value (0 to 300) and if you have a guy equipped with items of the same rarity value then they get a little boost. Then there are the unique items you can get from post-game. They are one time only (hence unique) and they give bonuses that you usually don’t see together, like Attack and Speed on the Postcard. The usual attack boosting belts lower your speed and the speed boosting shoes lower attack. Of course as you only get them once and they are by default Legendary, they have a rarity of 0 to 10. My stuff, however is all over the map. Rarities of all stripes abound. They would be much better items and not just curiosities if they had 0 level rarity. Sadly I cannot get more copies of the unique items (even if I destroy the item and restart on a new cycle) so my only resort would be a complete restart of the game. Do-able but a little annoying. I’d definitely have to grind on starting boards more.

But that’s that. Leaving only my most recent purchase, Final Fantasy XII. See, I’ve been a lifelong adherent to the Final Fantasy series, actually playing every incarnation. Yes, even Mystic Quest and Adventure. Even though Mystic Quest sucked big time and Adventure was actually a Mana game re-branded. I still have FFA somewhere. I should play that game again.

But let me tell you, all the praise I’ve seen heaped on this game has led me to believe that it is actually the second coming of Christ. I’m pretty sure it would cure blindness if applied to the forehead. I also got the strat guide because it is HUGE and that’s how I usually judge things. Of course this means I scale back spending, but I’ve done that already and yesterday I bought enough Peanut Butter and Jelly to last me for a long time. Possibly even two weeks or more.

But back to my point. The art in this game is phenomenal. I mean I’ve only read the artbook, but it looks so… good. Just lush, clean. It looks like FFXI and honestly I really liked the art in that one as well. Then the strat guide itself… whew. Just whew. All the charts, graphs and tables. It just makes me happy in the pants. My Aspberger’s makes me kinda keen on lots of detail to focus on, and this game seems to deliver.

Now, I haven’t even put the disk in yet so who knows. I mean Penny Arcade, who I’m usually in complete lockstep agreement with, seems to classify the wingman programming system as some sort of hideous option system that allows the game to play itself. Myself, I like the idea, but then I have that degree in computer programming, so that could just be me.

Stay tuned for some impressions as I make my way into this disk.

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